Here is some food for thought:
Kulicke and Soffa would be an excellent technical sponsor for teams near Haifa, if they are interested in becoming involved. K+S makes some amazing surface mount and circuit board processing equipment. If you can find engineers who design their equipment in Haifa and convince them to mentor your team, then you have a great local resource.
I am sure that there are other potential sponsors in Israel, but this is just one. Good luck.
Andy B.
heh, I ctrl+a ctrl+c’d my post (I’ve had some bad experiences with forums before) to “save” it before i posted, but for some reason I hit ctrl+r instead of c…
Good news is I hit the print screen button before it refreshed so:
Thanks again for all your help, sunday is decision day and I will definatly be taking points here for presentation.
I just finished watching the 2003 kickoff video (1:45:00 hehe) posted here (thanks Elgin Clock), and I’ll be reffering these forums to other Israeli teams even if we end up not doing this.
Now stop posting caus I feel guilty taking up your time and effort 
See you in the finals (whether through video or face to face 
)
You’re not waising our time, or mine, that’s what we’re here for!
Believe me, what you’re talking about is a better use of time than 90% of all other activity on CD nowadays.
Welcome to FIRST. You’re going to love it, any time you have questions, feel free to post them here, no matter how much a waste of time you think they may be
Cory
Yov, you probably know that each of the 10 teams has already been paired with a team over here for mentoring help. And all you have to do is ask the question in this forum and see what happens!
You are in a unique situation of having 10 rookie teams that you can consult with there too. You are not alone.
You will soon realize that this is not about building a robot and about what you don’t know. And I know that Team 007 is really looking forward to working with Team 1577!
I second everything that everyone has already said.
A suggestion that might help you to convince the others to join FIRST is that you could print out some or all of this thread and share it with them right then and there. If it has the same reaction on them that it did on you, then you may have an easy vote.
Well not all of us here speak english heh…
New question!
A simple one at that, the amount of work seems to be something most of my class is worried about, I was wondering how often do you work on the robots during the 6 weeks? (days per week, hours per day, again keeping in mind that we are a rookie team with 25-35 students)
thanks!
This can vary wildly. My team always had a very small dedicated core that showed up to all meetings. We pretty much met every day, on weekdays, 2-3 hours, weekends, almost all day, sometimes with a day or two between meetings when we were waiting on parts and had nothing else to work one. Since we would only have a maximum of around 10 people who would show up and actually worked instead of sitting around, the core members spent tons of time during the build season.
You guys have the advantage of all knowing nothing about FIRST. Yes, advantage. You don’t have to be the freshman that sits there and isn’t allowed to do anything because you “don’t know how”. You ALL don’t know how! You all get to start from the same place and learn together, and soon enough between the 30 of you, you’ll all be building a robot.
No matter how many people you have on your team, FIRST is a very large time committment. This turns people off immediately, but I guarentee you that every person who puts the time into the program will reap it’s benefits and learn a lot about fields you may not have been exposed to otherwise.
Cory
It varies by team. One team I mentor builds officially three days a week from 3 pm - 8 pm. But that really only holds the first week or two. After that it’s as much as we can be there (including weekends).
The other team I mentor is a rookie and we’re planning on building Monday - Friday until 4-6. We’ll add more time as we need it.
I know it sounds like a huge time commitment but it is worth it 100 times over.
~Allison
this usually depends on the team…for my team, it was usually 7 days a week, with 4-6 hours spent on weekdays, and approx. double that on weekends. this can change though…on the last day before ship date we were there till 4:00 am trying to get our robot to work. i’ve also heard of some teams having a ‘move-in day’ where some of the more dedicated team members move into the shop, and live there for a couple of days; i’ve never done that myself, though.
Our teacher told us it’d be 7 days a week, from 4 PM to 2 AM.
It put everyone off pretty much (not me actually), glad to hear it’s not that much (for other team member’s sake).
Simple question that is not. There are teams that work on their robots 3 - 4 times a week for 4 hours. Then there are teams like mine. I personally arrive after work ( 3:30 pm) and work till about 11:00 pm every night. Saturdays 9 am till 8 pm and Sundays 2 pm till 11 pm. Closer to ship there may be one or two all nighters. There are others on the team that show up once or twice a week. A lot depends on how complex you want to make it and how dedicated all of the students are. Each year I have said we will follow the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) method yet last year was one of our more complex robots. This did not have to be. If time is a factor, you want to enjoy the experience and you don’t want to wear your mentors out, just remember KISS.
Haha. On my team there was always a group of us that were there until all hours of the morning, but it was by choice.
Mentors at 11 - “Time to start wrapping things up”
Students at 11 - “Okay just let us finish this one part”
Mentors at 12 - “Done yet”
Students at 12 - “Yes but it didn’t work just let us try one more idea”
Mentors at 1 - “It’s really getting late, finish up”
Students at 1 - “Do we have too”
Mentors - “Yes, we need sleep”
Students - “There’s plenty of floor space”
And so on … all night.
When you actually start doing the work it seems like you have been working an hour when you’ve actually been there for 4 hours. I remember thinking it was a huge time commitment when I first heard about the team at my high school but I never really thought about how much time I put into the team when build season started. It got to the point that I felt that I couldnt spend as much time working on the bot. They had to force me to leave every night.
-Aaron
We actually have couches (kinda) in our robotics class heh
As long as I can tell my classmates that there are less hours involved than originally thought, it’s good news.
Actually, apparently it doesn’t vary that much.
In the first week or two, my team meets 3 days during the week and pretty much all day Saturday.
After that time, which is where we discussed design and stuff, we split up into groups which will work on various aspects of the design. For instance, last year we have a goal grabber team, a hopper team, an arm team, a drive train team, and a controls team. Each of these groups was responsible for getting their work down and was allowed to come in when they felt in necessary. I showed up every day, because I’m a loser like that (;)) and I had time, but some groups continued to meet just a few times each week, as they had relatively simple jobs.
And the simple jobs thing brings up a point. As a rookie team, or even as a more experienced team, simple is good. It takes less time, is less likely to fail, etc. But even simple still means you stay up till midnight the day before ship.
Well actually we’ll probably be working more hours than most caus we have a literature final RIGHT in the middle of the time frame, and it requires study time, so it would be made up for in regular day overtime.
That is unless we manage to move the final 
Ut-oh. Time to see if theres a suitable vBulletin translation available. (it has multi-language support for a reason…)
I suppose that won’t help with the posting, though. Hrm.
And don’t be surprised if you and your team members get so hooked that you find yourself spending more and more time on the robot just for the fun of it…
My team starts off meeting Monday-Thursday, 7 to 9 (p.m.) and on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to until about 5 p.m. As the weeks progress, it goes from 6 to 10 (p.m.) and Saturdays will push back as far as the janitors will keep the school open and as long as the adult supervising the room can stay (I’m usually that adult on Saturdays, and I’m easy to convince to stay). Two years ago, we really started enforcing a time limit on meetings and we found that having a time limit on the meetings seemed to help focus students on doing the work that needed to be done.
If you still think you’ll need to do some convincing of your team members, try showing them some of the existing teams’ websites; often they have photos posted of their teams in action. Team 116’s photo site can be found here:
http://www.invisiblerobot.com/robotics/#PRE2005
I really hope you can convince your team to participate in FIRST, not only because I think FIRST is wonderful, but also because I’m excited to hear updates on how your team advances!
Heidi
Uh…
I think I’ll just give them the jist of it in our native tongue